Nationalism,Domestic Politics,and the Japan Economic Rejuvenation

This article explores the role of nationalism in domestic politics in Japan since 2005 by contrasting the Koizumi and the Abe administration of 2012/2013. It argues that the Koizumi and Abe administrations have exploited nationalism as a means to consolidate political power, move away from faction-based politics toward populism-based politics to weaken factions within the political system with entrenched interests that are counter to or prevent bolder, necessary economic reforms to propel Japan out of 20 years of economic stagnation. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that while each politician has used nationalism to mobilize popular support for their respective administrations, Koizumi’s use of nationalism was to achieve an economic agenda while Abe’s use of nationalism has been used to achieve his political agenda which includes constitutional reform.     

Review: Lucian Pye,The Spirit of Chinese Politics

Abstract

The most appropriate review of Professor Pye's “psychocultural” study of Chinese politics would be an analysis of his personal motives for writing it. This might be approached via his childhood experiences as a missionary's son in China, or, alternatively, through his connections with the CIA in adult life. However, since this review argues that such an analysis (i.e., the method of his book) is unfair and irrelevant because it is an attempt to discredit ideas without examining the truth they may contain, I will try to set an example by confronting instead the ideas he presents and the assumptions which underlie them.     

Representation and Austerity Politics: Attitudes of Greek Voters and Elites Compared

Drawing on surveys of voters and MPs in Greece, this article analyses elite–mass interaction on key policy (austerity, European integration, immigration) and ideological issues after the 2012 elections. We find that while for the government parties, New Democracy and PASOK, the level of congruence is quite high, MPs from opposition parties (SYRIZA, Golden Dawn) place themselves in more exposed positions in comparison with their voters. The observed substantial variation in the intensity and direction of congruence, across parties and issue preferences in Greece, reinforces the view that the dimensionality of political contestation is not reducible to a single ideological dimension.     

The Price of Nostalgia: Menzies, the "Liberal" Tradition and Australian Foreign Policy

This article surveys some of the key contributions to the secondary literature on Australia's foreign and defence policy during Robert Gordon Menzies' two prime ministerships (1939–41, 1949–66), and seeks to identify Menzies' place in a "Liberal" and Liberal Party tradition through a reading of this work. Via a study of Menzies' imperialism, British race patriotism, nationalism, and attitudes towards Asia and the United States of America, it argues that the prime minister stands in an ambiguous relationship to the transformation that occurred in Australia's international orientation between the 1930s and 1960s. In the 1950s the Australian government's cold war foreign policy, and the political language that Menzies used in private and public to articulate it, were largely successful in balancing the competing claims of Britishness, Australianness and the newly-formed "American Alliance". By the early 1960s, however, his nostalgia for a dissolving imperial order was sufficiently pronounced that it contributed powerfully to a symbolic and rhetorical defeat for his side of politics, allowing Labor to claim the mantle of Australian foreign policy modernity.     

Cultural Politics, Communal Resistance and Identity in Andean Irrigation Development

This article uses two case studies to illustrate how Andean irrigation development and management emerges from a hybrid mix of local community rules and the changing political forms and ideological forces of hegemonic states. Some indigenous water-control institutions are with us today because they were consonant with the extractive purposes of local elites and Inca, Spanish and post‐independence Republican states. These states often appropriated and standardised local water-management rules, rights and rituals in order to gain control over the surplus produced by these irrigation systems. However, as we show in the case of two communities in Ecuador and Peru, many of these same institutions are reappropriated and redirected by local communities to counteract both classic 'exclusion-oriented' and modern 'inclusion-oriented' water and identity politics. In this way, they resist subordination, discrimination and the control of local water management by rural elites or state actors.